Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi • Hacker News Board

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#71

Post by krnlpnc » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:34 PM UTC

justin66 wrote: post #49

krnlpnc wrote: post #45

I find running my home servers on USFF x86_64 systems to be much more reliable. You can find them used for the same price as a kitted out raspberry pi, and they are faster, have more ram, and more durable disks. I like USFF because it's essentially laptop components in a mini desktop case. With power saving features turned on (currently I force all power saving features on using powertop) they don't use many watts. I…

> I don't rely on raspberry pi for anything that needs to run 24x7 because of sd card wear and the hassle of downtime and replacing/reflashing/reconfiguring a new card causes. One can always use an SSD. They work great.

Indeed, my USFF has an m.2 :)

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#72

Post by ComradePhil » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

m4tthumphrey wrote: post #55

Slightly OT: > Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi If you can get hold of one! I've been looking for a Pi4 for ages to use with PiHole but sold out everywhere, some have back orders for 2023 O_O Anyone got any recommendations of other devices that work well with PiHole? I have a Mac Mini acting as a home server but from what I've read, PiHole does not run great on it via Docker...

I tried running PiHole on a Windows box using Docker Desktop. It worked for a bit but it stopped working at some point... and I didn't bother fixing. It had been working fine for so long on my RPi.

You can buy fanless celeron mini-computers from Aliexpress for $100-$150. You can also get i5/i7 if you are willing to pay a lot more. Most of them come with pirated Windows (some sellers even say that they'll send it with Ubuntu pre-installed) but you can simply remove it and install Ubuntu Server and then install PiHole, Home Assistant or whatever you want.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#73

Post by Fiahil » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

djanogo wrote: post #42

Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200. These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version…

> [...] Currently running a HP G2 [...]

Great, except it's fucking huge and noisy.

I'm running a kubernetes cluster on a pair of raspberry pi and a 4-bay NAS as storage. What kind of lunatic would store data on a single, non-redondant, disk or an SD card ?

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#74

Post by bduerst » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:37 PM UTC

Fiahil wrote: post #73

djanogo wrote: post #42

Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200. These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version…

> [...] Currently running a HP G2 [...] Great, except it's fucking huge and noisy. I'm running a kubernetes cluster on a pair of raspberry pi and a 4-bay NAS as storage. What kind of lunatic would store data on a single, non-redondant, disk or an SD card ?

Pi's don't have SATA or PCI - what's the I/O of the drives? Is it noticeable?

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#75

Post by ramses0 » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:38 PM UTC

Also of note is their recent kickstarter / crowd-supply: https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-yellow

It's basically an enclosure + some extra integrated hardware for zigbee (and supposedly "easy-to-add" z-wave).

The ecosystem is heavily "run it on a rasb-pi" anyway, so you're 99% of the way there just purchasing or repurposing a PI, but it wasn't that expensive to back their crowd-funding and I'm happy to support an attempt at an "official" configuration that can be purchased.

I use it slightly for its own capabilities, but mostly as a bridge to bring more devices to HomeKit compatibility.

eg: I was able to add my wifi-controllable pool pump to homeASSISTANT and it creates corresponding devices in homeKIT so I can make an iOS shortcut accessible to siri: "Hey Siri, clean the pool" which turns on the pool cleaner. It's kindof like living in the future. :-P

I also found recently a "chromecast => airplay" extension/addon which... bam... now the few chromecast devices I have show up as airplay sinks for audio (not airplay2, but airplay1 is convenient for where I've got them put).

...and I just got some Samba-mount thing so I can rip my DVD's and copy them over to `/Media/*.m4v` which I can then blast out via chromecast (nice b/c both my chromecast and home-assistant PI are wired, so it shouldn't be sucking up wifi bandwidth, and keeps me from having to set up a real ).

It _really_ needs a complete overhaul of how it's thought about (ie: configuration via yaml, confusing organization of extensions, addons, configs, better update management) ... I'm a developer and I still get lost in the mental model they expose via the UI, but it gets the job done and it's got a good ecosystem and community to help figure out how to get done what you're trying to do.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#76

Post by afavour » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:42 PM UTC

djanogo wrote: post #42

Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200. These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version…

I did that too but those PCs are just stupidly massive for the purpose. Raspberry Pi 4s don’t require SD cards any more so the storage issue is moot. My RPi sits next to my router now, you wouldn’t even know it’s there unless you looked closely.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#77

Post by Saris » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

nerdjon wrote: post #7

I have to ask others, have people had good luck with this? I have tried to do this multiple times, with multiple models of Pi and every time after 6ish months it just seems to completely stop working. I can't get it to boot even off of a new sd card. Am I doing something wrong or does the hardware really not want to be run consistently in this manner? I have since decided to just run some home automation VM's on my m…

Yeah it's better to spend $80 or so on an off lease small form factor desktop. They don't really use that much more energy than a Pi but are much faster and more stable with real SATA storage.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#78

Post by dheera » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

scottlamb wrote: post #57

kkielhofner wrote: post #5

Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things like motion sensors, etc). It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in various…

I'm still figuring out Home Assistant. I love that it has a real ecosystem and that it seems to have a decent HTTP/WebSocket API (that I just started playing with). Some things I don't love: * A lot of the integrations seem half-baked or to not quite fit the generic Lovelace cards. I think to some extent this is an inherent problem in supporting a lot of devices that have crappy, non-standardized APIs. Example: if I…

I also hate that you have to install it as an OS or VM to be fully featured.

If you use the docker version it is crippled with no "supervisor" mode.

Also every now and then a light or switch will go greyed out in HA, their official apps still work, and I have to restart HA to be able to use it in HA again. Pretty annoying when you get home after a long day, soaked in rain, fumbling in the dark to turn on lights and now you have to fumble more to restart the damn server before you can use your lights.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#79

Post by vorpalhex » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

slothtrop wrote: post #9

kkielhofner wrote: post #5

Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things like motion sensors, etc). It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in various…

I'm aiming to use a supervised installation to free up the pi for other tasks, but concerned about performance. Will be booting from SATA to help to this end, and to avoid degradation from writing to microSD often (this may be the case when I start recording security footage)

You will probably not have a great experience running cctv from a pi. You may want something a bit beefier unless your cams are low res, mostly due to transcode/copying costs.

In terms of disk, you want multiple disks as either raid/zfs/btrfs/lvm. It will probably be better to do this on a separate machine and mount it via nfs.

For your boot volume, you can also use a usb thumb drive to help avoid sd card fatigue.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#80

Post by swayvil » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 4:51 PM UTC

It's like that scene out of Brazil. The wall panel is removed to reveal a greasy maze of tightly-packed houseguts. A dizzying complexity of convolving and cryptic organs for... turning on the lamp.